The January 2011 edition of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s “artcast” (née podcast) includes a sequence on Bill Fontana, the sound artist. At the 10:40 point, he talks about “Sonic Shadows,” his installation that is currently running at the museum. The work involves reactive triggers on the SFMOMA’s famed bridge, which runs atop its vertiginous atrium. However, the sounds that one hears are not entirely from the visible portion of the site. Instead, they are drawn from various places, many of them beyond the public’s mental image of the museum, such as deep in its boiler room. Fontana explains that “all the sounds you are hearing are actually happening,” though he allows there is a bit of “alchemy involved” (MP3).
There’s also an M4A version of the artcast that includes embedded images related to the various segments.
More on Fontana’s bridge-work at sfmoma.org (from which the above photo, by Don Ross, is borrowed). “Sonic Shadows” is scheduled to run from November 20, 2010, through October 16, 2011. If you’re in San Francisco this Thursday, February 3, there’s a lecture scheduled on the Fontana work at 6:30pm: sfmoma.org.
So, for Sunday enjoyment, a bit of self-styled glitchy folktronica: the four-track set The Forever Switch by the Coma Calling. Perhaps the key track is “Lying Amongst the Blooms,” which has at its base a heartbeat rhythm and a gated bit of muffled noir-movie drama, a rising muted-orchestra sample that cuts off suddenly, only to repeat again. The method isn’t uncommon, but it remains highly effective. It serves two purposes that contrast strikingly with each other. The tone itself is lush and nostalgic, even if it sounds like the audio is being filtered through layers of walls and muslin. But the cut is harsh, turning lush into beat.
The title of Douglas Rushkoff‘s recent book, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, is in essence — true to all such high-concept titles — a cheat sheet for the full text. Spend more than a minute pondering the four words that precede its colon, and you pretty much know what’s coming: Today we live in a world that is increasingly mediated by digital technology; people who fail to educate themselves about how that technology is controlled risk leaving themselves open to manipulation — i.e., to being controlled. As for those “commands” to the right of the colon, they provide the book’s structure, a coy nod to the Ten Commandments. Rushkoff’s isn’t really comparing himself to Moses. He’s comparing himself to, or acting as, a Talmudic-style scholar. He’s explaining how the written word shapes, informs, and provides a means to understand human existence. In this case, the written word is the hand-typed code that is the programmed back-end of digital technology.